


Hello, Old Friend

by inanatticinnovember



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M, Sadness, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:54:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1644566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inanatticinnovember/pseuds/inanatticinnovember
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ian realizes everything isn't what it's cracked up to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hello, Old Friend

_While you read this I suggest you listen to the song Canyons by Paw City._

\--

Ian stares quietly. He’s facing the bathroom mirror. It’s been a while.

_Hello, old friend._

He hasn’t seen his own face in a long time. It’s almost foreign to him, a lunar landscape, untouched by man. He rubs at the craters under his eyes, touches the milk of his cheeks, the chapped flaky plane of his mouth. It’s been a very  _long_  while.

A hand runs through his hair and then another and when pulling away, clumps of orange come with his fingers. It’s terrifying. He feels like he might be dying.

But then again, he knows what dying feels like. He’d died every hour, twenty-six days in a row. He doesn’t want to die anymore.

He drops his hands to the sink, brushing off hair from his fingers and pretends malnutrition hasn’t gotten to him. He wants to forget.

He blinks several times. The eyeliner is sitting lonely on the back of the sink. He picks it up, smudges it a little on his hands and begins to smear it under his eyes. He feels like a bandit, stealing his own face.

The eyeliner is replaced on the glaring white sink and he looks into the mirror again. Someone else stares back at him.

He can’t look anymore.

He turns away from the mirror, walks out of the bathroom, down the hall, out the front door and he keeps on walking. Walking, walking, walking, running. Away. He doesn’t want to look in the mirror and see the grave robber’s delusion that he’s become tonight.

The club takes him back without shame. Mickey had gone down the night before and gotten Ian his old job back. Ian didn’t want to know how Mickey’d done it. It didn’t matter.

It’s easy at first. He takes off his jeans and hoodie and steps into gold shoes that are supposed to make him fly. There is moments where he can’t breathe and he thinks maybe he’s going to want to crawl back to bed but he forgets easily and walks out of the back room.

He floats through the wet bodies and makes it to the holy fluorescent stage, stepping upwards. Shadows whistle. Ian breathes.

He moves his hips, swings them, but it doesn’t feel right and the light is too bright. His skin feels like it’s going to boil off.

There is a large canyon in his chest and he’s drowning in it.

The phantoms around him are hollering and holding out dollars but he doesn’t want them. He thinks of Mickey and he thinks of the way he’d stood in the doorway for hours and watched Ian’s back, monotonously waiting. He thinks of how Mickey had wrapped his arms around Ian’s shoulders and cried into his back. Ian feels like he has an inch of dead skin on his body. He feels dirty.

Every night he cuts himself to pieces and rations bits of himself off to the highest bidder. He is for  _Mickey_  and Mickey _alone_  and he can’t continue fragmenting himself.

He steps off the stage. He’s moving, and he can’t see, but it’s away. It’s away. It’s away.

Pushing, slipping behind doors, pulling on pants, red eyes and chapped lips and cold air on his face. Outside. 

It’s snowing.

He hasn’t seen snow in a long time.

It reminds him of pale skin and cold hands. It reminds him of Mickey.

He watches his breath cloud in front of his mouth, and takes three whole exhales before realizing that he’s breathing. Air is flowing in and out of his lungs and  _he’s living_.

He’s alive.

His feet move and he’s running. Running back. Running home.

He finds Mickey asleep on the couch, the remote caught between his face and the cushion. Infomercials play mundanely on the television. He’d been waiting.

Ian watches him quietly. He watches Mickey’s chest rise and fall and he wonders if Mickey knows he’s alive too.

"Mick."

"Mmm."

"Wake up."

"Wha?"

"Wake  _up_.”

"Why?"

"I wanna show you something."

Mickey trudges off the couch. Only for Ian.

Ian pulls him towards the front door, holding onto his hand for dear life.  
They make it out onto the porch, the two of them standing there silently, Mickey freezing in his boxers and tank top.

"What?"

"It’s snowing."

"No shit, it’s fucking Chicago."

"No, Mick, it’s  _snowing_.”

It is snowing. The world is turning. Life goes on.

The two of them stare again for a small moment before Mickey looks up at Ian. There’s an odd look that crosses his face. Ian thinks he sees something new there. Something endless like an ocean. “Yeah… Yeah it is,” Mickey says.

The canyon in Ian’s chest is filling back up.

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "Ian back on his feet after getting medication realizes that now that he isn't manic his job is actually terrible/degrading"


End file.
